More from this Week’s Issue

Our weekly look at news, trends and personnel moves in communications and marketing. This week’s stories include James Levine’s ouster at the Metropolitan Opera, a House committee looks deeper into the U.S. Olympic Committee amid the Larry Nassar scandal and Twitter halts accounts that were tweetdecking.

We take another dive into the new PR News Salary Survey to look at where nonprofit communicators and PR firm staffers rank in terms of base salary. We begin by looking at integration of communications and marketing. It turns out that integration of the two units is a bit farther down the road than you might think.

Resources

Letters, digital or sent via U.S. mail, are likely to make direct contact with customers. It’s important, then, to be certain they reflect your brand’s well-crafted messages. We offer many tips on how to make such letters more effective, but most important is that they burnish your company’s reputation with all stakeholders.

To be an effective and persuasive presenter, you must build trust and believability in the audience’s mind. The goal of presenting is likely to inform the audience of something or persuade it to act or not. To do this successfully, the speaker must be believable and likeable.

Credibility is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. People are not born credible presenters. Credibility is something a speaker must gradually build in the mind of the audience.

We often examine PR campaigns once they’re over as subjects for case studies. This time we take a slightly different route, looking at how a McDonald’s constructs a campaign whose goal is to attract the Hispanic market to its new Dollar Menu.

Richman Signature Properties became the new luxury division of The Richman Group , the nation’s 7th largest residential apartment owner. The Richman Group had been known only for developing affordable housing. Here’s how it ramped up its tactics and strategy to become a known entity in the highly saturated luxury apartment market.

The machinations on Capitol Hill and in the White House have provided a plethora of PR lessons. Yet there also is plenty to feast on beyond the Beltway. As examples we look at PR lessons from the NFL’s National Anthem case, the Weinstein scandal and Facebook’s about-face on Russian advertising and the 2016 presidential election.

How can a modest nonprofit make audience members aware of conservation issues in a far-off part of the world? Mixing technology and PR tactics helped Conservation International (CI) achieve its goals. This case study explains how CI did it and the lessons it learned.

We take another dive into the new PR News Salary Survey to look at where nonprofit communicators and PR firm staffers rank in terms of base salary. We begin by looking at integration of communications and marketing. It turns out that integration of the two units is a bit farther down the road than you might think.

Is the glass half full for communicators? The just-released PR News Salary Survey of some 900 communicators shows PR pros seem to be a satisfied group in terms of the money they make for the work they do. Base salaries best the average for American professionals and raises are rewarded often, although most are modest. On the other hand, more than a few communicators told us they weren’t completely satisfied with their salary. Finding the right balance of salary, bonuses, soft benefits and intangibles to recruit and retain the most talented staffers is an issue that adept communications leaders will continue to address.

It is obvious that who buys what is of critical importance to marketers and communicators. Statista’s newest consumer survey looked at that question from a gender perspective and found plenty of traditional assumptions remain valid. It also found a surprise or two, meaning the quest for knowledge of your audience remains an important challenge.

As a communicator, you know what you and your immediate colleagues think of you. But what about the C-suite? Do its members consider PR highly valuable or would it take a reputation crisis to make them realize communications is a valuable part of any company? That’s what we asked some 200 communicators.

Fundamentally our profession is about people—understanding how they feel and behave, what they want and where their concerns and interests lie, and adapting the organization accordingly. It’s almost counterintuitive that cold, unfeeling data can help us engage more authentically and effectively with humans. But evidence literally is all around us.